1. 1897–1900: The Making of a Potter

This chapter looks at Moorcroft’s training as a potter at the firm of E.J.D. Bodley where his father had worked as Artistic Director, and his education both at the innovative Burslem School of Art and at the National Art Training School (soon to be renamed the Royal College of Art). His appointment as a designer at James Macintyre & Co., Ltd. put him in a firm at the very centre of enlightened art education in the Potteries, its Directors including the forward-looking M.P. Wm Woodall (who had served on the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction), the philanthropist Th. Hulme, and the gifted ceramic chemist, H. Watkin. It was a firm developing its production of electrical porcelain, but keen also to invest in the manufacture of high-quality art pottery. The firm’s Minutes reveal the great benefit it soon derived from Moorcroft’s appointment. After just four years, Moorcroft had acquired an international reputation as a ceramic artist, and his Florian ware was stocked by exclusive retailers the world over, bringing widespread commercial success. It was the ideal collaboration of manufacturer and designer, of commerce and art, very much in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts. The chapter also considers Moorcroft’s distinctive integration of ornament and form, a quality often singled out in early reviews and quite different from the ‘applied’ decoration of much contemporary pottery. No less distinctive was his technique of slip decoration, his unusually rich colours achieved by staining the unfired clay with metallic oxides, and his unique practice of signing every pot by hand.